Rehabilitation Engineering Design Class

Each year, biomedical engineering students at UNC build custom assistive technology projects for people with disabilities. We obtain all project ideas from people in the community -- preferably in the Durham-Chapel Hill area. Up to 12 students work as small teams on 4-6 projects a semester. Each project has a supervisor, typically a teacher, therapist or other heath care professional, who works with the students to insure the device is safe and meets the needs of an individual with a disability. At the end of the semester, the students give the custom devices and a user's manual to the individual and their providers.

If you are interested in proposing a project and being the project supervisor, you must commit to working with the students for the entire semester. The students really need your support so that they can design and build a device that is useful to you and your clients.

Typically, the project supervisor has the following responsibilities:

1. Meet with the students up to 4 times during the semester at the supervisor's work location. This gives the students an opportunity to: learn more about the proposed device; see the setting where it will be used; and test prototypes that they have built.
2. Answer questions from the students when they contact you by email and/or telephone
3. If possible, attend the student presentations of their work; these occur four times during the semester on the UNC or Duke campus. It is especially important to attend the final presentation at the end of the semester.

Procedure for submitting a project idea:

• Check out previous student projects by checking out past projects at UNC. This will give you a flavor for what students have previously accomplished.
• Discuss the idea with the faculty member Richard Goldberg at UNC. He will help you tailor your proposal to insure that it is appropriate, according to the following criteria:

1. A small team of students has only 12 weeks to design and build the project; therefore, very simple and very complex projects are not appropriate.
2. There should be no published designs or commercial devices that address the need.
3. Total cost of parts not to exceed $750/project.
4. Clients and their health care providers should be available to interact with students throughout the semester.

• A list of all project ideas will be given to students on the first day of class. There will be more project ideas than student teams.
• Within a week, the faculty members will assign a project to each student team and project supervisors will be informed whether or not their project was chosen.
• Student teams will visit their supervisor during the second or third week of classes

Other projects are done locally in the fall semester at Duke University. Please consult their website for more information on submitting a project idea for the fall.